“Nerve center” of the cybernetic world

Heinz von Foerster and the Biological Computer Laboratory

The weird and wonderful field of cybernetics flourished
during the heyday of U.S. post–World War II research, when federal dollars
poured by the millions into university and industry laboratories and the rule
for oversight often seemed to be “anything goes.” No field of inquiry
tested that rule more vigorously than cybernetics, whose practitioners disrespected
disciplinary boundaries and frowned on the postponement of inconvenient philosophical
questions. And within cybernetics, no institution better embodied the bold
spirit of the new science than the U of I’s Biological
Computer Laboratory.
BCL operated from 1958 to 1975 under 25 different grants,
producing hundreds of publications and several pioneering machines. The lab
attracted dozens of world renowned researchers to fill permanent and visiting
staff positions. Students of engineering, natural and physical sciences, arts,
and humanities gravitated to BCL, carrying its lessons into their varied career
pursuits. Little appreciated on campus today, BCL was a bottom-up forerunner of
the university’s
current interdisciplinary efforts in bioengineering, cognitive
science, art
and technology, cultural computing, and human–computer
intelligent interaction.

The story of BCL is inseparable from that of its charismatic founder and only
director, ECE professor Heinz
von Foerster. (As one BCL alumnus, poet Michael
Holloway, aptly put it: “The biological computer in the Biological Computer
Laboratory was Heinz’s brain.”) The Viennese-born physicist
came to the U.S. in search of opportunity in 1949, informally circulating a
monograph that explored molecular bases for human memory. His work caught the
attention of neurophysiologist and cybernetics pioneer Warren
McCulloch, then
based at the U of I medical school in Chicago. McCulloch helped von Foerster
secure a position in Urbana as head of the Electron Tube Research Laboratory,
but the young professor’s true interests would prove to lie elsewhere.
Von Foerster promptly settled in as editor of the published proceedings of
the Macy
conferences, annual meetings on the East Coast at which McCulloch,
Norbert Wiener, Claude
Shannon, John von
Neumann, Arturo
Rosenblueth, Margaret Mead, and several others were laying the foundations of cybernetics.

During their wartime research, experts in communications, information theory,
and automatic control systems (then called “servomechanisms”) had
grappled with common problems involving what they called “circular causal
feedback systems.” The Macy conferences opened a discourse among leaders
in these fields, as well as leaders in physiology, ecology, and social science.
At issue was the definition of problems and solutions common to apparently
quite divergent enterprises—say, the design of an automatic antiaircraft
gun and the study of how
a frog catches a fly (PDF). Thus, the Macy group gave birth
to a new, transdisciplinary science. Recognizing its ancient lineage, Wiener
named the infant cybernetics (from Greek for “steersman”) and
defined it as the study of “control and communication in the animal and
the machine.” The child would find a loving home in a venerable, Boneyard-straddling
U of I building, the Electrical Engineering Research
Lab, in 1958. That was
the year von Foerster, fresh from a sabbatical, started BCL and rolled up his
sleeves on an Air Force research grant for the investigation of biological
computers.

Heinz and Mai von Foerster in 1960. “Mai was the enabling background
of Heinz’s career,” recalled their son Tom von Foerster. “He
was the neurons, she was the glia.”

Von Foerster created a big
stir in the media with
his "Doomsday" article
alerting citizens to the prospect of unchecked population growth, published
in Science in 1960. For his demographic analysis, von Foerster
drew upon mathematical techniques that he had developed earlier for quantitative
hematology.

Smart machines and self-organizing systems

Von Foerster spent that sabbatical studying neural networks, first at MIT
with McCulloch (who had relocated from Chicago) and then with Rosenblueth in
Mexico City. He was struck by the ability of large numbers of relatively slow
components (neurons) to quickly perform huge calculations by working in parallel.
At the same time, the Air Force was pushing bionics research with an eye toward
far-flung goals like superhuman pilots and astronauts. The upshot of this harmony
of interests was a series of futuristic machines that emulated aspects of the
human auditory and visual systems, as well as more general qualities of nervous
tissue itself. Though these BCL devices were analog, they count among the earliest
parallel computers ever built.

Graduate student Paul
Weston (PhD ’70) created a machine he called the numa-rete, an
array of photocells that could detect the number of irregularly shaped objects
placed upon it. Weston endowed the machine with circuitry inspired by McCulloch’s
proof that networks of idealized neurons could be configured to perform just
about any calculation. As von Neumann had put it: “[McCulloch] proves
that anything that can be exhaustively and unambiguously described, anything
that can be completely and unambiguously put into words, is ipso facto realizable
by a suitable finite neural network.” Weston’s numa-rete attacked
just one small portion of that calculable world (he would later attack much
bigger portions), but the project was nevertheless an impressive step toward
building a machine capable of abstraction. The popular magazine Electronics featured
the numa-rete in 1961, and soon thereafter Weston and von Foerster were invited
to the NBC studios in New York to demonstrate the machine for a national television
audience.

Photocell array and circuitry for Paul Weston’s
numa-rete.

Fully assembled, the machine is tested with a collection of irregularly
shaped objects.

Another BCL parallel computer, also featured in Electronics soon
after the numa-rete, emulated the action of the ear rather than the eye. This
was Murray Babcock’s dynamic signal analyzer, sometimes referred
to as an “artificial ear.” Von Foerster and Babcock (BSEE ’48,
MSEE ’49, PhD ’60) noted that the human ear violates a strict rule
of acoustical engineering which states that the more precise a given resonator,
the slower its reaction time. Quite the contrary: humans make quick, keen discriminations.
So the researchers hypothesized that the ear works like a parallel computer,
speedily calculating at what spot on the basal membrane a tone is most resonant.
Babcock then set about building a proof of the concept. His machine employed
banks of filters and parallel sensors to analyze the frequencies in an aural
spectrum. It worked well, and it worked fast. As such, the dynamic signal analyzer
not only mimicked the ear, but also served as a tool for scientific sound analysis,
forming the basis of Babcock’s later work in speech processing.

Babcock’s 1960 PhD dissertation described a more general biological
computer than either the numa-rete or dynamic signal analyzer. For this doctoral
work, he created an analog machine that exhibited basic properties of living
nervous tissue, such as the capacity to adapt, self-organize, and self-reproduce.
Babcock called it the adaptive reorganizing automaton. The device’s
elementary components were artificial, electronic neurons networked through
variable conductance paths called “facilitators,” such that preferred
paths of information flow would develop in accord with contingencies such as
information content, code, source, and location. “Thus,” wrote
Babcock, “the state of the automaton and its changes of state will be
dependent upon the stimulus history of the machine.” Babcock envisioned
the automaton as a tool for the examination of system functioning, as well
as a stepping stone en route to larger and more sophisticated artificial systems.

The fundamental preoccupation with self-organization in systems dated back
to the Macy conferences and continued in BCL alongside applications, like the
numa-rete and dynamic signal analyzer, of more immediate bionic significance.
In June 1961, BCL hosted a coming out party of sorts: the Symposium
on Principles of Self-Organization at Allerton Park. The symposium brought
together such notables as McCulloch, general systems theorists Ludwig
von Bertalanffy and
Anatol Rapoport, Nobel economics
laureate Friedrich
Hayek, management guru
Stafford Beer, neuropsychiatrist Ross
Ashby, logician Lars
Löfgren, and
cybernetician extraordinaire Gordon
Pask. In his foreword to the symposium’s
published proceedings, ECE head Ed
Jordan cited dean Bill
Everitt’s call
for a “new electronics,” and laid out the promise and the challenges
of designing “man-like” systems. He challenged electrical engineers
to tackle the fundamental, interdisciplinary issues involved in this enterprise.
One electrical engineer who would later meet this challenge and pass it along
to generations of ECE students was the great teacher Ricardo
Uribe. He joined
BCL in 1973 and collaborated with biologists Humberto
Maturana and Francisco
Varela on the theory of autopoiesis, which
attempted to explain the organization of living systems.

Front (left) and back views of Babcock's adaptive reorganizing
automaton.

Scholars gathered at the Allerton
Conference Center in 1961 for a BCL
symposium on self-organizing systems. Pask is front row right, with Ashby
second to his right. McCulloch is bearded, back row center. At hs left
shoulder is Beer, with dark moustache. Babcock wears a bow-tie, second
row center. Weston is four rows in on the right. Löfgren attended
but is not pictured. (Click on image for IDs.)

Visualizations of autopoiesis. Maturana developed
the theory, largely while working at BCL, along with his student Francisco
Varela. Uribe modeled autopoiesis for
the first time on computer, using U of I's PLATO network.
These frames visualize, from left to right, the ongoing decay and production
of “links,” preserving the
system’s unity even as its form and components change. (Biosystems
5, 1974)

A network of trust

With license granted by the wise (though sometimes wincing) Jordan and Everitt,
the magnetic von Foerster set about harvesting the connections established
through gatherings like the Allerton symposium, attracting an extraordinary
array of free thinkers to BCL for fruitful residencies. The first of these
was Pask; he was followed in short order by Ashby, Löfgren, and the logician
Gotthard Günther, all of whom worked happily at BCL for many years.

Ashby’s reputation in cybernetics was already well established through
his two influential books, Design
for a Brain (1952) and Introduction
to Cybernetics (1956). He was also recognized as the creator of a quintessential
machine of the cybernetics movement: the Homeostat. Along with early robots,
called “tortoises,” built by British neurophysiologist Grey Walter,
Ashby’s Homeostat was a big inspiration to young cyberneticians like
Babcock and Weston. The Homeostat, like Babcock’s later automaton, served
as an exemplar of a basic characteristic of living systems—in this case ultrastability.
The self-regulating, electromechanical machine, consisting of four interconnected
magnets, would react to perturbations in its operating conditions by reestablishing,
through feedback, its original stable state. After family considerations forced
Ashby to return to his native England in 1970, he wrote back to von Foerster
to thank him for “the miraculous years of the 1960s.”

A powerful presence at BCL after 1968 was that of U of I composer Herbert
Brün. Music related pursuits within the lab had begun with David Freedman
(MSEE ’62, PhD ’65), a von Foerster student interested in analysis
of musical instrument tones, who extended Babcock’s dynamic signal analyzer
to an analog-to-digital converter. The campus at large was home to a tradition
of experimental and electronic music dating to 1955 with Lejaren
Hiller’s
landmark ILLIAC
Suite, written for strings using the ILLIAC
I computer.
Hiller went on to establish the U of I’s famed Experimental
Music Studios,
which attracted students like James Beauchamp (PhD ’65), now an emeritus
professor of ECE and music. Brün joined the EMS faculty, but very soon
resonated to the intellectual frequencies emanating from BCL. The key idea
behind his compositional philosophy, which he called “anticommunication” and
defined largely in terms of information theory, was cybernetic to its core.
Many of his compositions, now regarded as landmarks of the avant garde, were
actually computer programs designed to be “played” either graphically
or acoustically. This approach naturally proved irresistible to students north
of Green, and so engineers signed up regularly for Brün’s composition
seminars, which became de facto BCL courses. In addition, Brün contributed
prolifically to BCL publications and co-taught cybernetics courses with von
Foerster.

Fostering the free and productive associations of such a diverse group of
people surely constituted BCL’s most ambitious experiment in control
and communication. The cybernetics lab was itself a grand test bed of social
cybernetics, as its founder knew only too well. In an interview years later,
von Foerster identified the special quality of BCL as “an atmosphere
of trust.” That trust “helped create a network of friends that
made the individual people so very productive and happy—whether it was
the leading minds like Ross Ashby or Gordon Pask, or the students that fell
into this network. … [The students] suddenly saw that their so-called
professors were their friends.”

Computer-generated artwork by Brün graces
the cover of a student-produced BCL periodical.

Testing “The System”

No surprise, then, that as the 1960s progressed, BCL evolved to reflect the
social upheavals taking place on campuses worldwide. The lab, where systems
had always been subject to scrutiny, became home to all manner of refugees
from The System. These included draft resisters and antiwar activists, sufferers
of mental illness and drug addiction, women students who found BCL more welcoming
than typical science and engineering labs, and even foreign political refugees
like Uribe, who fled the U.S.-backed Pinochet coup in Chile. Most of all, however,
BCL simply attracted students and researchers who wanted something different
from the typical university experience. Awareness of BCL spread by word of
mouth through networks of students, and those curious enough to visit were
welcomed by a display of brightly colored, boldly titled BCL literature—all
of it free. Von Foerster was known to keep an eye peeled for interesting characters
who stopped by the literature display. Thanks to his wife Mai, the hospitality
extended uninterrupted to the von Foerster home, which always welcomed members
of the BCL family.

In the spring of 1968, a group of students from a variety of majors approached
von Foerster and Brün with a proposal for a course on heuristics—a
broadly focused, interdisciplinary survey of how problems are identified and
solved, whether by artificial or living systems, by individuals or groups.
BCL was already home to several research projects addressing problems of memory,
learning, and cognition in general, so von Foerster considered the proposal
as an opportunity to extend the lab’s research into the classroom. He
assembled a group of faculty consisting of himself, Brün, Maturana, political
economist Herbert
Schiller, mathematician John
Wetzel, computer scientist Ron
Ruesch, and visiting biologist John Lilly,
who was widely known for his 1967 book The Mind of the Dolphin. The
following fall, 70 students enrolled in the course, offered under the auspices
of ECE and the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences. It was the beginning of
a series of popular courses that were enabled by von Foerster and BCL, but
largely student-directed. Typically for their final project, BCL students would
collectively produce a book to add to the BCL publication series. These memorable
courses and the adventurous books that document them stand as the salient achievements
of BCL’s later
years, just as the lab’s kooky cybernetic machines marked the early years.

The capstone publication of the 1968–69 heuristics seminar, which students
entitled The Whole University Catalog, left no doubt as to its inspiration.
A popular periodical out of California called The
Whole Earth Catalog had
first appeared in 1968. Founder Stewart
Brand conceived the twice-yearly
catalog as a sort of heuristic for the counterculture, or as he described it,
a tool for “the individual to conduct his own education, find his own
inspiration, shape his own environment, and share in his adventure with whoever
is interested.” Accordingly, The Whole University Catalog served
as an unauthorized guide to the U of I. Emulating the oversized format and
densely graphic appeal of The Whole Earth Catalog, the students’ production
contained information about local food, housing, and culture; academic and
social resources; and essays, poetry, graphic art, and photography, all informed
by a playful cybernetic outlook. Copies were sold for a dollar apiece, with
profits going to the university’s Special Educational Opportunities Program.
Much of the collection was irreverent toward the academic establishment and
dismissive of traditional academic publishing standards, earning The Whole
University Catalog the scorn of certain campus administrators and even
one Springfield legislator, who hauled von Foerster before a special hearing
to answer for his students’ work.

In 1970, von Foerster taught a course on engineering ecology that led to The
Ecological Source Book, a collection of descriptive articles, technical
illustrations, and artwork, as well as resources and strategies for ecological
activism. A 1971–72 course on cognition and computation led to Metagames, another
large-format production featuring ideas and materials (including cutouts
and game boards) for games of “psychological, political, sociological,
and epistemological significance.” This project drew inspiration from
Buckminster Fuller’s “World
Game,” which enlisted young
people in efforts to solve problems like poverty, pollution, and war. A 1973–74
cybernetics survey seminar concluded with the anthology Cybernetics of
Cybernetics. The biggest, most elaborate, and most professionally produced
of all the BCL publications, Cybernetics of Cybernetics has been
reprinted for university courses elsewhere and is still considered one of
the best overviews of the field. (BCL alumnus Ken Wilson called the volume
“a web site before its time”[PDF].) A “scene” developed
around these seminars, with many students participating year after year,
registering or not, dipping into and out of classes and projects as they
pleased. Whatever the seminar's official title and particular focus for a
given semester or year, students simply referred to it as “Heinz's
seminar.” Ultimately, “Heinz's
seminar” was a never-ending discussion that could pop up anytime, anywhere
in town.

1969, 96 pp., saddle-stitch, 11 x 17 inches

1970, 270 pp., saddle-stitch, 8.5 x 11 inches

1972, 96 pp., saddle-stitch, 11 x 17 inches

1974, 523 pp., perfect-bound, 8.5 x 11 inches

Covers of student-produced publications from BCL seminars.

Two interior pages of Cybernetics of Cybernetics exemplify
the book’s integration of typography, photography, illustrations,
and novel navigation tools. Left: A section about information theory
co mbines the “freaky” with the “geeky,” as dancers
are photographed in poses that illustrate lengthy, dull lists of logarithms
used in calculating uncertainty. Right: Punch dots help readers navigate
nonsequentially using a pencil or stylus. The diagram at the center right
of the page, within the text wrap, is an “entailment structure” to help readers make links among concepts and authors.
Graduate student Ken Wilson (MSEE ’74) described the book as “a
web site before its time” (PDF).

“Heinz’s seminar” 1971–72.
This photo was printed in the Metagames book. Von Foerster is at top right.

Endgame

Through the 1960s BCL had shifted decidedly in favor of a “softer” kind
of research, even if that shift was prompted in large part by the stubborn
persistence of a question—What is cognition?—that lurked
behind the lab’s earliest machines. To be sure, BCL remained home to
brilliant technical experts like Weston, whose attention turned to the vexing
problems involved in making a natural-language computer interface. But von
Foerster had difficulty keeping his Pentagon sponsors sold on the value of
that project, to say nothing of BCL’s forays into philosophy and experimental
education. What’s more, in 1970, the U.S. Congress, attempting to quell
antiwar protests by reducing the Pentagon presence on campuses, delimited
military research funding (PDF) to projects bearing directly on military
operations. The field of cybernetics had been dissolving anyway as research
money, military and otherwise, flowed into emerging areas like cognitive science,
computer science, robotics, and artificial
intelligence, where cybernetic insights
were put to more immediate use.

Von Foerster made a final, ambitious attempt to keep BCL alive by submitting
a proposal to the National Science Foundation entitled, “Cognitive Technology:
A Citizen–Society Problem Solving Interface.” The proposal drew
on campuswide expertise in cognitive theory, educational psychology, linguistics,
computer networks, programming, and multimedia. Perhaps the centerpiece was
Weston’s database approach to natural-language interfacing which, it
was hoped, would encourage the individual participation necessary to identify
and solve problems at a social level. While their idea bore a certain affinity
with ECE Professor Don
Bitzer’s PLATO network, under development in the
Computer-Based Education Research Laboratory, the BCL people believed the nature,
scope, and scale of their vision called for an entirely different architecture.
Echoing through the proposal were portents of future innovations in computer-aided
learning and collaboration—expert
systems, enterprise
resource planning,
structured information, even the Internet itself—all of it directed toward
the goal of truly participatory democracy. Despite the fact that NSF had explicitly
called for proposals of basic research addressed to “national needs,” the
agency declined to fund the BCL proposal, sealing the lab’s fate. For
decades, the clever and peace-loving von Foerster had played the Pentagon funding
game like a master. But NSF was, apparently, a different kind of system.

After 1975, the von Foersters built a retirement home on Rattlesnake Hill
near Pescadero, California, and Heinz kept busy as a writer, speaker, and mentor
until his death in 2002 at age 90. A great deal of material by and about him
is now accessible via simple Internet searches.
ECE has commissioned an English
translation of Albert Müller’s
essay “A Brief History of BCL” (originally
in German),
which the Department is now publishing along with other historical
materials about BCL.